I barely heard the bell.

In front of me were rows of VHS and Beta tapes. Hundreds of movies.

At fifteen, it felt like evidence that the world was much larger than I had been told.

Marc and Seb came in behind me, pushing past each other to get a look.

Elvis Gratton.
A Clockwork Orange.
Monty Python.

We wanted everything.

This was 1984, when watching a movie still required leaving the house, talking to another human being, and occasionally rewinding something before returning it.

We watched maybe a dozen films a week.

On the nights when there was nothing good to rent, or no money left to rent it, we met in a park and acted scenes out.

Mostly comedy.

A lot of Monty Python.

We liked the absurdity, but also the strange intelligence underneath it. The idea that a stupid premise, taken seriously enough, might eventually reveal something true.

At some point we stopped replaying scenes and started inventing our own.

We wrote them.

We acted them.

We took turns directing.

There was no camera.

That didn’t seem to matter.

The shots were there anyway.

I can still see some of them.

I still cut them differently.

Seb became a filmmaker and has written and directed four features.

Marc became a lawyer. He still writes scripts, but now people pay considerably more when he uses complete sentences.

As for me, I seem to have spent most of my adult life trying to recreate that park with better equipment.

I studied advertising, then worked as a creative, writer, director, producer, editor, actor and stage director. For eight years, I ran my own production and post-production company.

I’ve worked in television, fiction, documentary, advertising and on all kinds of projects that start with an idea and quickly meet reality.

There is never enough time. Sometimes there is enough money. Someone changes their mind. Something doesn’t work. Something unexpectedly does.

And eventually somebody says:

“This should be pretty straightforward.”

This is an important sentence in production.

It means things are about to become interesting.

I know development. I know production. I know sets. I know post.

More importantly, I know what happens in the spaces between them.

That’s usually where the story changes.

I’ve changed chairs many times over the years.

Writer. Editor. Director. Producer.

But I’ve always stayed around the same table.

The one where people try to turn something imagined into something real.

I’m not sure that at fifteen, standing in that park, I could have told you what I wanted to do with my life.

But looking back, the answer was already there.

We were just doing it without a camera.